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Can a Shaman Cure My Fear of Normalcy?

Last weekend, I found myself sitting in front of a shaman in a mansion in Berkeley, talking about my commitment problems. You know, cliché white people stuff. “I have this fear,” I told the shaman, “that I’m going to wake up one day with a husband, two kids, a house in the suburbs, and wonder how I got there, as if it’s my destiny. So to avoid it, I continually destroy my relationships at the first sign they’re headed in that direction.” The shaman nodded sympathetically. She was holding a beaker of psychoactive toad venom that was apparently going to change my life. “Basically,” I asked, “can the magical toad help me come to terms with my fear of being a basic bitch?” She smiled warmly, then put a rainbow straw into my mouth and told me to inhale.

This paranoia—that I’ll somehow accidentally stumble into normalcy—is nothing new. But it’s getting worse, now that my peers have started to do the things people do around 30: get married, buy a house, have kids, pay for Amazon Prime, et cetera. For some people my age, these trends spark a FOMO herd mentality: Partner up and breed now or die alone. For others—i.e., me—they incite a rebellious, tween-grade tantrum: Fuck you, society, I do what I waaant! There’s nothing like a baby-shower invite to send me on a Tinder rampage.

I’ve had this kind of defiant reaction for years, in various forms. I ditched college to move into a squatter commune. I’ve avoided getting a “real job.” As of now, I don’t even have a fixed address.

And it’s the same story in relationships. I’ve yet to live with a partner. In the past, once a relationship began to feel routine, I cheated. Even in my queer relationship, a delightful escape from the hetero-normative default settings, as soon as she initiated talk of buying a house together, I panicked and pulled away.

Basically, as soon as something feels stable, I sabotage it. I’ve often thought this impulse stems from my super-white-bread, middle-class upbringing: I grew up in a small town with married parents who loved each other. It felt safe but not interesting, and I’ve spent my life fighting that fate. In some respects, I trust my instincts. But other times, I wonder if this fear of normalcy is leading me to destroy valuable, loving relationships simply to preserve some juvenile idea of rebellion.

The problem is, I really like being in a relationship. It feels good to have a partner in crime. I mean, I don’t want to YOLO solo forever. And I think a lot of people my age are wrestling with the same question: In order to experience love and a lasting partnership, do you have to close the chapter of your life that includes experimentation, spontaneity, and, well, freedom?

Enter the magical toad. The invitation to Berkeley came from some new friends, whom I’ll call Colette and Dan. She is a doctor of psychology and professional dominatrix, he the creator of a mega-successful tech startup that has something to do with weed. They’re both in their mid-30s, they’ve been together for three years, and they’re polyamorous. Has a more Bay Area couple ever existed?

When I arrived at their beautiful hilltop home on a Saturday morning, Dan answered the door wearing silk pajama pants. “Colette’s in the orgy room, meditating,” he said with a smile. They had hired the shaman to come up from Mexico that afternoon, to dose a handful of their friends with a psychoactive toad venom containing the powerful hallucinogen 5-MeO-DMT, known to induce divine revelation or, in Colette’s words, “ego death.” (Think ayahuasca but without the puking.)

With a few hours to kill before the ceremony, Colette invited me to one of her dominatrix sessions, to watch her electrocute a man’s balls. How could I say no? So after breakfast we all hopped into Dan’s self-driving Tesla and headed to Colette’s dungeon. Watching their exchange—Dan made Colette oatmeal as she packed her Prada bag full of latex lingerie—made me smile. In a lot of ways, they are my ideal couple. They’ve managed to create a relationship that’s at once loving and domestic, but also completely unorthodox. They have a beautiful home, support each other, and share breakfast each morning, but they also take on other lovers and host chic orgies—poly_glamorous_ is a word that comes to mind.

Still, they’re the first to admit that defying convention is no walk in the park. “It’s really not easy to be in a poly relationship,” Colette said on the drive. “You’re allowing yourself to be thrown into situations that can arouse feelings of jealousy, insecurity, neediness—emotions you always thought you would avoid at all costs.” But ultimately, she prefers a relationship that’s challenging to one that’s binding. “That traditional relationship model just doesn’t work for me at all,” she said. “Plus, it feels good to carve out your own type of relationship. The idea of doing what everyone else does just feels insane to me.”

“People seek monogamy and ‘till death do us part’ because it gives them security,” Dan added. “They want to believe that the other person is never going to run off. But Colette and I both value our freedom to explore life in an unbounded fashion, and to love and to build relationships with many people. Within the open relationship, what makes Colette so special to me is that I learn more from her and I evolve quicker with her than I have with any other woman.”

“In all my previous relationships, my partners said I was ‘too much,’ ” Colette recalled. “With Dan, we obviously have issues that we have to work through, but I’m so happy to finally be with someone who radically accepts me for me: a weird, polyamorous sex worker.” The key, they both agreed, is not entering a relationship with someone who’s fundamentally trying to make you more normal than you want to be. This is certainly a mistake I’ve made time and time again.

Certain people get off on sacrificing things for the sake of their relationship, but personally, it just makes me angry, and then I grow to resent my partner for preventing me from having what I want (as if it’s somehow their fault). Like, having a family seems cool, but then what if I meet two Louis Garrel look-alikes who invite me into an MMF threesome? I’m just supposed to say no? Then again, there are moments when I question how practical it is to view life as one endless hedonistic pursuit. There’s a part of me that wants to form a domestic life with someone. I grew up on Woody Allen movies, imagining my future in a book-filled Manhattan apartment with my tweedy, intellectual partner, hosting dinner parties for all of our interesting friends, and breeding unusually gifted children. I have the same fear as many women: Will I regret my decision not to have children after it’s too late?

I asked Colette if she ever felt the pressure to have kids. “Recently,” she said, “Dan and I were on acid, and we were laughing and having this amazing time, and then suddenly I had this thought, like, ‘Wait, if we had kids, it would ruin everything. Everything we’ve been working for, our freedom, would be destroyed.’ ” She thought for a moment. “We’re on this earth to make things,” she went on. “Some people choose to make babies. Others choose to write books or make films or start a company. We’re not leaving our genes behind, but we’re leaving a different kind of imprint.”

What about the women who do manage to write books, make films, and start companies while still having children? In recent years, the Sheryl Sandberg brand of lean-in feminism has been promoting the old “you can have it all” narrative again. It’s like, Okay, sure, but what if you’re not rich enough to have a maid? And what if you don’t want your kid to be raised by a nanny? Then you’re doing a double shift. The bottom line is, at some point, something’s gotta give. And the more time I spend with Colette and Dan, the more I admire them for not surrendering to the social matrix of conventionality.

After an eye-opening lesson in erotic electrocution in Colette’s dungeon, we drove back to their house. A handful of their friends arrived. The shaman, dressed like a member of the Source Family, prepared her psychoactive toad venom. I sat in the orgy room—a large, skylit space with multiple couches jigsawed together to form a giant bed, which Colette assured me was recently steam cleaned—watching people emerge from the shaman’s sanctuary, bright with new perspectives on life, some literally crying tears of joy.

Finally, it was my turn for enlightenment. I gave my spiel, smoked the vapor, and awoke from my trip 20 minutes later feeling . . . nothing. Despite leaving my body and entering a supernatural psychedelic dreamscape, I had zero emotional response to the drug.

“Does that mean I’m shallow?” I asked the shaman. She laughed and said, “Maybe it means there’s nothing wrong with you.” I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic.